SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD Review – Great Speed & 10 Year Warranty

Last week at Computex, SanDisk announced its latest and greatest in consumer solid state drives, the SanDisk Extreme Pro 6Gbps SSD. Targeting gamers, PC enthusiasts and media professionals, the Extreme Pro boasts performance consistency, as well as all around speed increase from its last round of consumer SSDs. Fortunately for us, SanDisk provided 240, 480 and 960GB samples of the Extreme Pro SSD for our review on return to Canada. Well, it’s our first weekend back and here we work on the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD Review.

LISTED SPECIFICATIONS AND PRICING

The SanDisk Extreme Pro 6Gbops SSD is a notebook form factor SSD that is 7mm thick. Perhaps one of the loudest displays of support is the first ever 10 year limited warranty for this SSD, whereas most others have yet to gamble with 5 year warranties. Performance is listed at 550MB/s read and 515MB/s write for 480 and 960 capacities, the 240GB capacity coming in just a bit higher at 520MB/s write speeds. IOPS are consistent with all capacities at 100K read and 90K write. Another interesting spec lies in active power consumption of .13W for the 240GB capacity and .15W for the 480 and 960GB capacity. Not only might this provide an increased laptop battery life, but also, this SSD is fully DEVSLP compliant and drops down to an incredible 5.5mW while in that mode.

SanDisk has listed a MSRP of $189 (240GB), $369 (480GB) and $599 (960GB) and the Extreme Pro is available today. Unfortunately, we are seeing elevated pricing of this new release at $229, $424 and $699 when we check Amazon at the time of this report. Just as a quick comparable, we posted our report of the new Crucial MX100 just a few days ago, the Crucial pricing being lower than the Extreme Pro. The MX100 is only available in capacities up to 512GB and, should you choose the more value oriented MX100, your warranty is 3 years and not 10, as with the Extreme Pro.

EXTREME PRO SSD COMPONENTS

Perhaps a bit unexpected, the main components of the Extreme Pro match that of the Extreme II, yet SanDisk is marketing this SSD has having better speeds, as well as much better performance consistency over time. We tested all three capacities and found the performance of all three to be identical; our displayed sample for this report will be the 960 GB capacity Extreme Pro.

On the face of the PCB, we have the Marvell 88SS9187 eight channel controller, each channel being capable of supporting speeds up to 200MB/s. There are only eight NAND flash memory modules on this SSD, each having 128GB RAW capacity. The memory is SanDisk A19nmex2 ABL MLC Toggle mode NAND flash memory. Also present is a Micron 512MB DDR3-1600MHz SDRAM cache memory chip.

SANDISKNCACHE PRO TECHNOLOGY

SanDisk has marketed the Extreme Pro as being the best available in this category for gamers, PC enthusiasts and media professionals who remain within SATA 3 storage choices. As we had stated, the components of this SSD haven’t changed whatsoever, but rather, nCache pro has been implemented through SanDisk’s own engineering team. nCache Pro uses two tiered caching.

nCache pro is intended to improve random write performance of small 4KB blocks, as these blocks account for the physical improvement one sees in operating systems. With this, three storage layers are utilized; volatile cache (or DRAM cache), nCache (non-volatile flash write cache) and mass storage through MLC NAND flash memory. nCache pro accumulates those small 4K writes and then consolidates them to larger MLC sections of the flash memory array, via high-speed transfer.

IDE, PATA, SATA, SATA II and SATA III. Sand Force 2281, Jmicron Controller etc.. That is enough. A consumer do not need a 10 years of warranty. Producers are making very little and unnecessary updates for their products. They change the NAND or controller… They change the warranty period… But SATA III is same. 550 read 520 write is same. Consumers want real renovations. The producers must focus on new speeds and forms. SATA is out of date by now. SATA IV or SATA Express will never occur. The new solution, the only solution is PCI-e. The best example is 2.5-inch Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVM Express) PCIe SSD. Surpassing 3000 MB. SATA became unnecessary after PCIe.

Not only about SSD but also other devices. For example Flash Memory. Toshiba announced UHS-II Flash Cards. The fastest cards ever. That means UHS-I speed is out of date by now. But producers still focus on UHS-I cards. They still try to make up UHS-I. They announce UHS-I U3 cards!! Min. 30 MB guarantee. UHS-I and UHS-I U3 became unnecessary after UHS-II.

Technology companies do not want to provide the best solutions to the consumers. They only think about marketing! and money! So They move very very slow about replacing old technologies. They only focus on unnecessary making up operations.

Benjamin Hojnik

> SATA is out of date by now. SATA IV or SATA Express will never occur. The new solution, the only solution is PCI-e.

sata express is based on pci-e and will happen anytime now. And i don’t see the issue if a drive has more warranty.

Jack John

SATA has followed to twice the speed. 1.5 Gb/s, 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s. People wait a 12Gb/s SATA with the name of SATA IV or SATA express. I know, sata express is based on pci-e. But not same. But pci-e will not twice the SATA III. It will not follow the twice speed process.

And Please say me what will you do with 10 years of warranty? Are you going to be able to use this SATA III drive in 2024? Please say me that do you have a chance to replace the new SATA II HDD of your laptop with a 8 yer old IDE hard drive? Is an 8 year old IDE drive compatible to your new laptop?

Will this SSD be compatible to the laptops or PCs of the nine or ten years later?

This SSD or any SSD will be useless after 4 years maximum.

I am sure and you can be sure that; technology is not updated for the consumer profits. It is upfdated only for the money. Proof? Intel always renews the Sockets with its new CPU models.

Benjamin Hojnik

> SATA has followed to twice the speed. 1.5 Gb/s, 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s. People wait a 12Gb/s SATA with the name of SATA IV or SATA express. I know, sata express is based on pci-e. But not same. But pci-e will not twice the SATA III. It will not follow the twice speed process.

Regular sata is already scrapped and everything from now on will be based on pci-e. Sata 6gbit is the last version of sata that will use its own signaling.

It doesnt matter what speed it follows. Sata express is already almost 4 times faster (pci-e 2.0 x4 2GB/s). I really dont see the probleme here.

>And Please say me what will you do with 10 years of warranty? Are you going to be able to use this SATA III drive in 2024? Please say me that do you have a chance to replace the new SATA II HDD of your laptop with a 8 yer old IDE hard drive? Is an 8 year old IDE drive compatible to your new laptop?

It doesnt matter how i will use it. Sandisk has its edge with 10 year warranty and i see nothing wrong here. Its always better to have more warranty than less

Jack John

Hey Benjamin I am not an ignorant fanatic youngster.

But you are a REAL consumer like Intel & Sandisk and others want.

Producers can remain to sell a product to you for decades with little unnecessary updates.

You are ready to be defrauded.

Benjamin Hojnik

What ?! What you just said makes no sense whatsoever.

Jack John

I said “producers only make up the old technologies” You say that “sata express is based on pci-e”. Is not this a make up for the SATA? It is BASED on pci-e. It is not new!

Benjamin Hojnik

Who cares if its new or old… Its MUCH faster than previous version (4 times). If they used a shortcut (by using pci-e) instead of developing new signaling protocol (which is way more time consuming and brings no benefit over pci-e) i see no issue here. With pci-e, speed bumbs will be much quicker (because all they need to do is bump the number of lanes or just use the latest version of pci-e)

MargaretRLavallee

Another interesting spec lies in active power consumption of .13W for the 240GB capacity and .15W for the 480 and 960GB capacity. http://merky.de/805fcc

billycuth

So is this drive worth the extra $70 vs. a Samsumg 840 Evo with 20GB more storage? I am looking at the 480 and 500 GB models. Can spend either $225 (evo) or $295 (extreme pro)…

It depends on your needs entirely. Do you want a performance SSD or a typical user SSD? Do yoiu need the capacity more than performance?

billycuth

I would say performance is #1 as a gamer. But I am wondering if the Sandisk is really worth that extra cash. Is the difference THAT noticeable? I will be coming from a 5400 RPM 1TB drive… More space is always better, but I don’t think 20GB will make or break me.